Researcher * Writer * Cartoonist * Educator

Monthly Archives: December 2015

I’m pleased to announce my newest journal article, which is part of a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on “Comics as Scholarship.”

The entire issue is particularly interesting because all of the articles are composed in the form of comics. Each of the authors adopted a slightly different visual approach in order to suit their topics. My article examines the educational comics in the long-running “Introducing” and “For Beginners” series, books that I’ve seen the offices of almost every academic and postgraduate student I know, but which have never been given a proper critical appraisal.

In this article/comic, I examine the history behind these books, and look closely at how they combine visual and verbal modalities in unique ways. As the books I chose to examine are devoted to Derrida and Foucault, the article also delves into a critique of structuralism and post-structuralism.

“Multimodal Authoring and Authority in Educational Comics: Introducing Derrida and Foucault for Beginners” is my second comics-style journal article this year. I think this is a fascinating area for further study, and hope to publish more in this style in the future. The “Comics and Scholarship” issue of DHQ is an encouraging step forward for a promising direction for academic writing and publishing.

Evan Wexler receives the main by-line for this story, but there is no accompanying text – the entire story is contained in Taylor’s illustrations – so it’s hard to know who contributed what to this piece.

Wexler calls himself a “Visual Journalist”, and most of his other work for Frontline has an infographic aesthetic, involving images which look a lot like sans-serif fonts and attempt to convey the same myth of neutrality that’s attached to typeset text.

This piece with Taylor is interesting in that it has a more tactile and subjective feel to it. The smudged ballpoint pen ink and yellowed photographs pasted onto graph paper come close to mimicking a student assignment from the years before Microsoft Office.

There’s an emotional component to the way this data is presented, a nostalgia for the “simpler days,” when sharing a newspaper photo meant actually cutting it out of the newspaper. It’s a good illusion; I found myself staring at my computer screen looking for traces of eraser dust on the images of the paper.

And yet – a closer look at these images reveals a digitally manicured sheen. The smooth gradient colours behind the drawings, the copy-and-pasted heads in the “7/10 teens” graphic, all reveal that these images have been constructed with Photoshop, not gluestick.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to digitally massage these images to look more authentically handmade, but I don’t think that’s the point. The digital effects, subtle as they are, mark this piece as having been processed, at some stage or another, but a computer, of being buffed down and shined up by a professional designer using an expensive suite of software.

There’s just enough obvious fakery here to let the reader know that, no, of course Frontline didn’t just publish scans of some graphs drawn straight onto graph paper with a BIC pen. That’s just not how journalism works.